This game rules. RoboCop rules.

I feel like I need to start this off by saying that the original RoboCop is my favorite movie of all time, so I’ll admit that I am probably extremely biased, and probably giving it a much higher rating than it deserves. Teyon made this game for RoboCop fans like myself. You can see/hear/feel the amount of love and care that they put into this IP. This is the first time something with “RoboCop” slapped on the title has been able to correctly portray the original film’s humor. The news reels, radio advertisements, and posters that are littered throughout the game feel like they would fit in perfectly within the film. I wouldn’t say the writing and dialogue is always top notch, but it definitely had some really good RoboCop-esque moments sprinkled throughout.

“If you could call my boss and confirm what happened here. He won’t believe I was taken hostage for the third time this week.”
“You have to defuse the bomb. The explosion could cause the company enormous losses!”

You can 100% feel the lack of budget here (that I’m guessing mostly went to Peter Weller lol), but I am still extremely impressed with what Teyon was able to do with this game. The gunplay is very simplistic, but also very satisfying. The absolute raw power you can feel from blasting off the Auto-9 helps that. They knew what they were doing with the sound design when it came to that thing (some areas not so much, but more on that later). Straight out of the gate the dopamine hits you hard while you’re blasting away criminal scum. You feel like a walking tank, as you should with a game where you play as RoboCop. The Auto-9 feels so great that I hardly ever wanted to use any other gun that you find laying around, especially once you get more upgrades. It was fun to experiment every now and then when you find something new, but I just wanted to use the big, loud, funny Robo blaster.

They also included the genius idea of being able to pick up and heave large objects 100mph at enemies’ heads. Computer monitors, chairs, gas cans, motorcycles, other enemies. It’s stupid fun. It’s so fun that in later parts of the games when the enemies can drain your health, I sometimes would get myself killed because I was just wanting to throw everyone into the ceiling and not pay attention to my health bar.

Let’s talk about upgrades. This game has a simple skill tree system that can affect basic stuff like damage output, damage resistance, etc., but also includes some cool gameplay features like being able to ricochet bullets off walls or blast off a shockwave, instantly KO’ing your foes. However, it also includes a handful of completely useless stuff, or at least useless outside maybe one single moment within the game, which is unfortunate since obviously you won’t know that until the finish the game. This especially sucks because the game doesn’t give you enough experience points to be able to max out all of the skills. I suppose it’s a good thing on one hand that you don’t feel overpowered by the end of the game, but on the other hand it’s annoying to realize that you probably should have just spent those skill points on something else that would have been more useful. A good example is the ability to hack into enemy turrets. I think there were a total of six turrets in the whole game, and they were all toward the very end of the game, making going for the specific skill completely useless outside of getting an achievement. It’s almost like they knew how useless it was so they tacked on the achievement so people would actually go for it. It would be different if there was any sort of New Game+ included, but at the time of this review there is not.

I was purposely not following the development and marketing for this game to both avoid spoilers, and more importantly, not give my hopes up for an actual good RoboCop game. So I was surprised to discover that this game was semi-open-world with a decent amount of side-quests. It was cool to roam around small sections of Detroit and discover little areas and NPCs that needed help. The game is decent at rewarding you for exploring with pick-ups for experience points and whatnot. At least for the first half of the game, I feel like that really slowed down in the later half. Speaking of the later half of the game, even though there’s a good handful of locations and set pieces you can visit, you end up revisiting a lot of the same places toward the end, which is a bit of a let down. The only thing saving it is that the game isn’t too long so it doesn’t feel like it overstays its welcome.

Back to the topic of side-quests, I do believe I enjoyed the majority of them. Some side-quests feel just like a main quest with a lot of substance, while others are your generic side-quests of “go over here and talk to this person, now go back and talk to this person” or quite literally “go grab me a towel, RoboCop.” I’ve noticed a lot of people have the complaint that the pacing of the sections between the shooty-shooty parts is really bad, and I really can’t disagree much, but I personally liked having those slower moments here and there for the most part, they just barely crossed that line of too much filer.

This game also gives you a good amount of dialogue choices. It lets you either “Uphold the Law” or “Serve the Public Trust.” I will say that they make it pretty obvious which answer is supposed to be the “good” answer, but it’s still a nice addition that I wouldn’t have expected. They talk about how your choices matter and whatnot, but I feel like there’s really not that much of a difference. I don’t know this for sure without doing more research, but I doubt there’s much of a change to the story in the grand scheme of things.

Speaking of the story, I want to keep this review as spoiler free as possible, so I won’t really talk about it much. It’s fairly decent! Again, nothing too amazing or shocking, but it kept my interest and I truly feel like it works as an actual good sequel to the original. (Yes I know it takes place after RoboCop 2, but forget that.) It perfectly fits right into the world that the film created, and understands what that world even was to begin with.

With a game like this, you just know there’s going to be a bunch of obvious references to the source material. However, I really respect that most of them weren’t super in your face “remember THIS” type stuff. I think the only line that made me roll my eyes involved some bitches.

For more specific complaints I have, the sound design is pretty hit or miss. There’s strong highlights like the aforementioned Auto-9 sound, Robo’s footsteps, and some overall good environmental sounds in some of the areas. The intro of the game really knows how to grab you! But then some of the mastering of the dialogue is just terrible. Someone’s voice can just shoot up 20 decibels mid-sentence and blow your ears out. Speaking of dialogue, the voice acting is also pretty 50/50. Peter Weller thankfully knocks it out of the park. It’s like this guy never stopped being RoboCop. There’s a few other great performances, but then there’s really, really bad ones.

Everything leading up to the ending was great! The final boss? Not so much. The boss fight itself was ok, felt like a proper boss fight at least, but story-wise it seemed really rushed in at the last moment and felt out of place. Everything that happened BEFORE the final encounter felt like a better place to end the story at. I also think there were even more issues with the sound mixing during the ending, which added to the feeling of it being rushed and tacked on to me. Also, with all the different upgrades and skills you can get, how was there no unlockable move where you can stab perps with your data spike? What’s up with that?

Overall, I really REALLY enjoyed this game and appreciate everything it did. It is definitely rough around the edges, but it's gameplay, setting, and overall RoboCop-ness carries it a long way. Would this game be as good if you stripped all the RoboCop off of it? Not at all, but that’s the point of Rogue City to begin with. This is THE RoboCop game. Honestly, I think the biggest roadblock that Teyon had was the lack of money. I’ve been hearing a lot of good stuff about their Terminator game since Rogue City’s announcement, so I now feel inclined to check that out soon after playing this. Apparently Rogue City is a huge advancement over Terminator, so basically it just comes down to giving Teyon more money and 80’s IPs to work with. Escape from New York? Big Trouble in Little China? They Live? I’ll be down for whatever they do next after this one. That goes for any sort of New Game+ or DLC if they hopefully decided to go that route.

This is truly the best RoboCop related piece of media since the original from 1987. Made completely for RoboCop fans BY RoboCop fans. The closest that I’ll ever get to my dream RoboCop game, and I couldn’t be happier for its existence.